Tide - By Daniela Sacerdoti Page 0,66

shy, prickly charm and her lovely dark looks, only to be bitterly disappointed. Nobody had ever come close to her, not even remotely.

Nobody, that is, until Sean arrived.

Her eye fell on a book with a green cover and the image of a red-haired girl in a dress and straw hat sitting on a rope swing staring up at her. She took the book in her hand: Anne of Green Gables. How much she’d loved that book. She’d read it endless times. She opened the first page.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! From Aunt Juliet to Sarah, October 2005.

She’d been eleven years old.

The feelings of joy and tenderness gave way to a wave of sorrow. Aunt Juliet was gone and would never come back. She recalled their last day together, when she’d been so hard on her, so impatient. Like she’d always been, really. Only now Sarah was beginning to realize how present Aunt Juliet had been throughout her life, and how often she had rebuffed her for it, instead of being thankful. Now Aunt Juliet was gone – and her Uncle Trevor, and surely her cousins, didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. She’d been severed from the last of her family.

Maybe that’s what happens to all Midnights, sooner or later. One by one the people we love are picked apart and destroyed.

Something cold and steely blossomed in her heart. She would not let all this loss annihilate her. It would be easy to give in to the pain, but she wouldn’t – she’d turn the grief into strength. She would be tempered, like metal in water. From the day she’d been told about her parents’ death, to her first hunt, to Sean’s appearance in her life and throughout the destruction of Cathy’s Valaya, during those terrible times a new Sarah had emerged. The little girl lying alone in an empty house had grown into a resilient young woman who had learnt to face her destiny. Even the way she walked had changed, the way she held her body straight and proud.

Like Morag.

A small, soft nugget of the old Sarah was still nesting in her heart – the girl who longed to be loved – but it was hidden from sight. The new Sarah stood by herself.

Except when Nicholas was around. That’s when her strength ebbed away somehow, albeit temporarily. Why did he have that effect on her?

And most of all, where were her dreams? Were they lost forever?

She shook her head at those uncomfortable thoughts and opened the wooden box again. She slipped the butterfly earrings into her ears. That’s what she was, a chrysalis that had turned into a butterfly. And she wouldn’t let anyone steal her newfound strength.

Sarah took hold of the candlestick again and closed the door on her former hideaway. She’d leave the little memories where they were. She felt they belonged there.

She wasn’t ready to go back to bed, to share her space with Nicholas. He was fast asleep anyway, with no sign of nightmares anymore.

Who is Martyna? she asked herself as she closed the heavy wooden door of the music room.

She hesitated for a moment, then crossed the corridor and pushed the heavy, two-panelled door of the grand hall open. The light of the candle, flickering with the omnipresent draughts, seemed very small in the vast room. The ceiling was crisscrossed with black wooden beams, and the polished floor was covered in precious, exotic-looking rugs. Beams of golden light glimmered against the ceiling, the candlelight reflected in the crystal chandelier.

Sarah walked on slowly, turning around to illuminate the whole room – a stag head hanging on the far wall, together with tapestries and paintings. Suddenly, Sarah remembered her grandfather, Hamish, saying how much he would have loved to have demon spoils hanging on the walls – but he’d never been able to have them, because the Surari ended up dissolved in the Blackwater. Sarah shuddered, thinking of severed demon heads hanging on the walls of this place, watching them as they ate around the huge oak table.

She contemplated the velvet curtains drawn over the windows, a colour somewhere between crimson and burgundy, and then she moved the fabric aside slightly, to get a view of the beach. The sea and the sky were fused in blackness, pale clouds moving slowly like frayed, ghostly sails. Something stirred in Sarah’s mind, the hint of a memory, something important, something she had forgotten, dancing at the edge of her consciousness.

In her mind’s eye, Sarah saw herself as a